Saturday, January 10, 2009

What's your favorite caper? Any why?

Duane Swierczynski loves to pay tribute to his favorite crime writers and characters, everything from Jean-Patrick Manchette's head to Philip Marlowe's socks. But there's no one he loves better than Richard Stark's Parker, and no tribute more thrilling than the topographical accuracy of The Wheelman:

"Lennon took a hard right onto Twentieth Street, going north, then a quick left down a tiny side street that ran parallel to JFK."Now, here's where Philadelphia geography gets interesting. Even after ripping out the Chinese Wall, some bits of the old city remained. Tiny streets and alleys that used to run through the industrial blocks sat right next to the new thoroughfares. One of those alleys was the key to the getaway plan."

Man, I loved that. There's something seductive about planning a score on that big a scale, about making not just a bank vault, not just a building, but a whole city part of the plan. Stark did that in my favorite of the Parker novels, The Score, and what can give a crime-fiction reader a bigger vicarious rush?

Now, what about you? What's your favorite caper novel, movie or story? Why? And why do we love crime capers?

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The new University of Chicago Press edition of The Score comes with a foreword by John Banville (a.k.a. Benjamin Black), which ought to be interesting.

You started the punic wars on the other post and now I just can't stop.

I'd say punic is more prone to low wordplay than even caper.

I'm not sure I'm such a big fan of caper stories because it's too easy for them to become formulaic. That's one reason I like The Score so much and what The Wheelman does with the theme. Both vary the formula by setting the caper on a huge scale and making gorgeous use of their settings.

I soliti ignoti/Big Deal on Madonna Street would be my choice for best caper movie, too. The comedy of the characters' lives is not just color or background, but rather the essence of the story as much as the heist is. And the movie was a great inspiration for Westlake.

I don't know if The Big O is exactly a caper movie in the classic sense, but it's my favorite example of whatever it is.

I have to say that without watching them again I would be hard pressed to come up with details. I do tend to really like these small, gritty British and Irish movies. I don't seem to mind the violent aspects as much as I do in American films, and that's an interesting question why. Off the top of my head, I would say that I tend to trust small film makers motives more, and Hollywood driven motives less. It's not totally apropos, because not a caper flick, but I did really, really like "In Bruges", and that certainly has it's share of gore, but I can see that somehow being made into a big Hollywood production and me, well, not hating it, exactly, because I saw all those Jason Bourne pics and was entertained to some degree, but not feeling very involved in it either.

I would be interested to hear what you think of Usual Suspects, partly because I think it works the first time, but not so much the second, and I wonder if some of the freshness of it is now irretrievably gone, or if it's just a story you can only see once, which is my hypothesis.

I suppose the violence in those movies might work because ... hmm, because it's fun, and yet it's serious without being too moralistic. This might make it a cousin of such violence as occurs in, say, The Big O.

You know it's hard to get into all this stuff without immediately overgeneralizing, but I think it may be that the opposite is true. I hate to keep coming back to 'In Bruge' because it's slightly off point, but I think morality is what drives it, and yet it's not ultimately 'serious', meaning it's not setting itself up as a tragedy. In the big Hollywood movies, scores may die, and yet they are kind of cartoon deaths, they don't count. Maybe there is a death to avenge, but in a way that vengeance is a plot device as well. I think in the smaller movies the death have a kind of gravity and significance, because people react the way they do in real life, which is uneasily. And a lot of funny things can happen as a result of that uneasiness, but they don't forget the horrible moment in the telling of it.

In Elmore Leonard, who I'm most familiar with as far as writers who write a kind of caper, it seems to me that one story he tells many variations of is about people who have maybe seen too many Hollywood movies and who get ahold of the wrong end of the stick, and think that they can do what screen characters do--ie, get the guns, get the girls, get rich. And the story is funny because it involves the way these fantasies run up against reality time and again.

Well, that's way too many examples on too superficial a level to really be coherent, but maybe it will incite some more pertinent comments from others.

Or maybe a pertinent comment from me. I think you're right about In Bruges. The deaths and almost-deaths carry great weight. Incidentally, this is why the movie was somewhat jarring. The trailer had made it it out to be a rollicking comedy, which it was not (though it did have its funny parts).

And one can't get much more pertinent than "because people react the way they do in real life, which is uneasily. And a lot of funny things can happen as a result of that uneasiness, but they don't forget the horrible moment in the telling of it."

That's an intriguing take on Elmore Leonard. If he can pull that off consistently, he's as good as everything people say about him and maybe even better.

The caper isn't a subgenre I'm well-acquainted with, I rarely watch movies and I've never read a book by Michael Crichton, but I did much enjoy The First Great Train Robbery with Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland et al., based on Crichton's novel. Much suspense, laced with humour, and captures mid-Victorian England surprisingly well. Well worth a look if you haven't seen it.

I love The Usual Suspects, but I think a lot of people complain about it being "gimmicky," without going into any details. Sort of in the same way that Memento was gimmicky too.

Peter -

You're right about the In Bruges ads making the film out to be more of a whacky comedy. Normally, going into a film with false expectations would ruin the experience for me. But I think In Bruges was so good it didn't matter I'd come in expecting to see something else.

Philip -

The Great Train Robbery is a good novel. Based on what you liked about the film, you'd probably like the book too. I haven't seen the movie yet, but plan to.

Philip, I had not seen The First Great Train Robbery, and I didn't even know Michael Crichton wrote caper novels. I had not planned this post as a fishing expedition for movie and book suggestions, but it's reaping a rich catch. Thanks.

justcorbly said... The Italian Job, the 1969 film with Michael Caine, not the recent remake. Classy, funny, great ending.

This is tough to discuss without spoilers, but I was not at first a fan of that ending. Then I read a thoughtful comparison of the endings of that movie and the remake, and I began to regard the original's ending more favorably.

Seana, In Bruges' trailer was a subject of discussion on this blog some time back. Someone said there had been at least two trailers for the movie, with one more faithful to the film.

You'll see that I, too, plan to use these comments as a shopping list at the local video store. If you like comic capers, or think you might, I can't recommend Big Deal on Madonna Street highly enough. And it has quite a cast, Marcello Mastroianni and Vittorio Gassman, to name two.

Some very nice cameos in the original Italian Job including Noel Coward and Benny Hill. Someone also told me Harold Pinter's in it too, but he's not listed in the credits and I've never seen him.

I seem to remember the Noel Coward and Benny Hill appearances, but I had not heard about Harold Pinter.

That movie might be worth another viewing. On first viewing, the ending seemed gimmicky, perhaps too much a product of its time. But I later read a discussion of the original and the remake that compares that ending favorably to the new version's. In the remake, everyone gets away with everything, a fantasy of painless American greed, according to the thought-provoking analysis.

In books: The Wheelman, something by Lionel White, something by that Stark guy (sorry, can't pick up a specific title). By White, probably Clean Break, but only because it was made into The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. But anything by Lionel White is great.

Still books: Al Conroy's Devil in Dungarees. Brian Garfield's Relentless. Zekial Marko's Scratch a Thief. The first two Earl Drakes by Dan Marlowe and Four For the Money by the said writer.

In films: Jean-Pierre Melville The Red Circle (Le rouge cercle or some such in French). Melville must have some other films I'm overlooking, but that has had the best-staying effect. Reservoir Dogs. Still Tarantino's best and still one of the best crime films ever made. The Killing, if it only were not for the voice-over narration! The Asphalt Jungle. The caper scenes in Gun Crazy, which are just superb, superb, superb.

A Fish Called Wanda has a good caper scene in the beginning, too, so we shouldn't forget the Ealing film I Stole a Million. Nor The Ladykillers!

Brian Garfield has credibility with me because he was a friend and, I think, occasional collaborator of Westlake's. I've seen a number of the Jean-Pierre Melville caper films. The man had a good eye for character.

Yep, this list of yours would make a nice syllabus for a crime-film course. I need not specify that the godawful remake of The Ladykillers is not to be mentioned in polite company.

Peter, I didn't see the Coen Ladykillers, but I know it has some pretty civilized and knowledgeable opponents.

Westlake and Garfield wrote a novel together, I think it's called Gangway! It's what one could call Westlake's only western, but it takes place in California, which many think is not fit for a Western.

I'm not even sure I knew until now that the new Ladykillers was from the Coen brothers. I saw it on a plane a few years ago, and I found Tom Hanks' performance repellant and self-indulgent. I think he did it just to show that he could do comedy, and it made creepy viewing. I also don't think the American setting worked terribly well.

Anything with Westlake's name on it is worth a look. One would naturally ask of a Western in California what the characters did now that they no longer had anymore West to conquer. Maybe it's a Western about to turn into a crime story.

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This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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